People who use LinkedIn are usually looking to: find a job/clients, hire or partner with new people, keep tabs on their business acquaintances, and network, or more specifically, become visibly active in professional communities that matter to their long-term career goals. If you want to find employment or employees, LinkedIn offers wonderful search tools that let you drill down by multiple factors. You can search for people or companies by location, field of expertise, skill level, and even keep the search to people within your network or who are only one degree removed.

Premium users of LinkedIn (from $19.95 per month) get a few special features not found in the free account. For starters, when you sign up, you'll be invited to webinars that walk you through some of the bonus features of having a paid account. Paid LinkedIn members get to send between three and 25 InMails per month, depending on their subscription level, and InMail messages are guaranteed. Search tools, another benefit for paid members, give you much greater leverage with the search functionality as well as better insights into the results. Premium users can also set up alerts that flag when a profile meets some saved search criteria. LinkedIn offers excellent features for searching and sorting through your contacts. You can set parameters to find people by geographic location, company affiliation, the industry they work in, and more. LinkedIn's settings are options for making your public profile visible to no one or everyone. If everyone can see your profile, you still have the option to turn off or on the visibility of certain sections, such as picture, headline, summary, skills, education, and additional information.

On Linkedin site it is easy to have an account that provides real value without asking much of you in return, although you can certainly explore the site's many features and services, too. Setting up an account amounts to copying and pasting your resume into a few fields, and adding connections takes little more than browsing through the names that are already in your Web-based email accounts.

LinkedIn is not a typical social network; but, it isn’t a true content platform.

LinkedIn is focused on business connections; marketers tend to think of it as B2B only.

LinkedIn has a much, much smaller audience than Google,Twitter or Facebook.

LinkedIn lacks the integration of professional bid management platforms.

Stay In Touch On The Contacts Page

Contacts page it’s where you keep track of your long list of connections, but it also offers alerts and tags. These features, along with helpful filtering options, keep everything organized and easily accessible.

Moving down the page, you’ll see a list of your contacts. When you hover over a profile, you have the option to add the person to a tag, send a direct message, hide his or her profile or delete the contact. The tag feature allows you to save members whether you’re connected to them or not into useful lists for easy organization and sorting.

The sorting and filtering features are useful when you want to find all of your contacts related to a specific campaign, company,location, etc. You can sort by Recent Conversation, Last Name, First Name and New it’s basic and quick.

Filtering gives you a few more options like Company, Location, Title, Saved, Hidden, Potential Duplicates and Connections .

As with any social network, you should be thinking of expanding your reach. How do you do this on LinkedIn? You can connect by sending invitations to:

Twitter followers

Business contacts

Contacts in your email address book

Friends and family

People found through LinkedIn’s search toolbar

Joining LinkedIn Groups it's a great way to expand your network. Some groups are open to the public, while others require acceptance by an administrator. Choose groups that fit your company’s niche and have active participants who share common traits. Once you have joined or been accepted, introduce yourself and begin engaging with the other individuals. It is very important to stay active by frequently sharing links, commenting, and asking questions.

How to create a LinkedIn campaign, you’ll first need the following:

A LinkedIn account

Basic understanding of your audience

Ad copy

Video

Now go to the LinkedIn Ads login page and click on “Get started.” This will present you with two types of campaign options: (a) Create an ad; (b) Sponsor an update.

Click on “Create an ad.”

You should see at the following screen:

You’ll need to fill in a few fields:

Campaign Name: Create a name for your campaign. I recommend following any naming conventions you use on other platforms.

Ad Language: Select the language for your ad.

Media Type: Select either a basic advertisement that follows the traditional format, or a video ad that includes a play button on the image.

Ad Destination: This will allow you to link your ad to either a LinkedIn profile page or an external URL. If you are driving traffic to your website.

Ad Design: Create your headline and description. Note that LinkedIn is a bit limited in this regard. The headline has a 25-character limit, and the description cannot exceed 75 characters (2 lines). You can also add your imagery here.

Ad Variations: LinkedIn allows you to create multiple variations of ads. For each ad, you can choose either an external URL or a page on LinkedIn. Note that the choice of location does not affect the price — it costs just as much to send traffic to external pages as it does to send it to internal pages.

Once you’ve completed your ad, it’s time to focus on targeting. This is where you can really start to leverage the power of LinkedIn.

While some of the targeting options on this platform are very similar to Facebook and Twitter (target by age, friends, company, etc.), LinkedIn allows you to go to the next level. As mentioned earlier, you can target people by job title, employer, industry, and even skills/ interests.

LinkedIn offers two basic pricing models: CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). The cost-per-click model has a minimum CPC of $2 — which definitely makes it a higher cost network than Google or Facebook. LinkedIn also offers a suggested bid range to reach the top position.

The final step in the process is to submit your ad by simply clicking on “Launch Campaign.” Note that LinkedIn reviews almost all ads manually, so your campaign won’t be online until it goes through a quick review process.